[orbifold]

Here is how I think about it: Learning to program is learning a new way of thinking. When you learned to do mental arithmetic the point was not that you would necessarily do mental arithmetic at all times in the future. Programming is the last step when solving a problem with a computer, learning to program teaches you how to solve problems more generally.

I recommend reading a book like https://mitp-content-server.mit.edu/books/content/sectbyfn/b..., going through it will hopefully as enjoyable as it was for me when I read it in high school. There are many kinds of programming which are not super enjoyable (to me), so I gladly leave those to AI, but based on personal observation, my experience programming lets me be much more effective at using AI to solve problems than a fresh MIT / Oxford grad with less programming experience.

Finally it depends on your interests: If your interests are computers and X, than combining both to solve problems you find interesting can make using AI worthwhile, because then programming isn't the main point.

[andai]

This is an old idea that there is great value in learning Lisp, or other "unusual" languages, because they force you to think differently about problems.

An amusing implication here is that the more "useless" a language is economically, the more valuable it's likely to be to learn it (for the effect it has on your mind).

[nr55544477777]

It’s amusing that you boil their comment down to “you should learn Lisp” based on a book recommendation that is about anything other than learning Lisp.

[gpjt]

That is an excellent point so long as you don't take it too far! Lisp/Haskell/Erlang yes. INTERCAL/Brainfuck less so...

[iKlsR]

When I learnt programming I had a big dusty Perl book, I didn't even have a computer. A mix of library books and using my savings to print out c++ tutorials etc was the thing. Then came forums, then came youtube (matrix soundtrack and notepad), then stackoverflow etc.

If I had access to even the weakest offline model now as I did back then where it can save me hours of trial and error, docs sifting and getting my questions closed I'd be a different man.

I love using Claude to one shot interactive tutorials, so far I've done voxels, shadow mapping, sdfs for font rendering, a weird dialect of asm and much more. I see it as the perfect assistant to mentor someone nowadays, if you have actual passion for the field it's hard to go wrong.

[orbifold]

I learned programming in QBasic in MS-DOS, you could just start the IDE and the documentation was filled with cool examples. Super easy to run any program. I made music / weird drawings etc.

[vunderba]

The big thing is that learning to program is really about improving your ability to formalize your ideas by methodically breaking them down into a decomposed set of deterministic logical statements.

I think this cross‑pollinates into many domains, because in a sense what you’re doing is learning how to take something you know and express it rigorously in a mathematical form / structural syntax.